Transitions SHOULD be hard (in this place)

I’ve had a problem with transitions my whole life. Bed to shower, shower to kitchen, reading to greeting guests, greeting guests to mowing the lawn…it’s always a fucking battle with myself. When I was diagnosed, I was told what I already knew: “You’re bad with transitions.” You overreact (I do). You shut down, or get stuck, or blow up at things that seem easy for everyone else (I do). I was given new words. Cognitive inflexibility. Behavioral rigidity. Insistence on sameness. Resistance to change. Perseverative behavior. Pathological demand avoidance. Dependence. Delay. Resistance. Slow. Poor. Intolerance. Difficulty. Rigid. Distress. Impaired.

OK, so I’m clearly not cut out for life.

But is it life?

In a coherent system, the one we evolved in, transitions aren’t hard. Not because organisms there are tougher or more flexible, but because the transitions themselves make sense. They’re part of that system. Seasonal shifts. Puberty. Grief. Rest. They don’t happen suddenly or without warning. They come with cues. Physical cues. Environmental cues. Even social cues.

Here’s the thing: organisms from those systems don’t “adapt” to the timing of transitions. They’re formed by them. There’s no gap between the system and the self. The rhythm outside becomes the rhythm inside. I don’t just endure spring. Don’t be ridiculous. I become the kind of creature that responds to spring. I don’t “handle” hunger. I become hungry. In a place that makes sense, that leads to finding or growing food. The feeling arises with purpose, and the transition it asks of me (movement, focus, effort) is supported by everything around me. I’m doing what I’m meant to, when I’m meant to.

That’s what real feedback does. It shapes you as it informs you. And when something in the environment changes (something biologically real) a feedback-sensitive person picks that up fast. They change in response. And they change quickly, and they change well. In step with what’s actually happening.

That’s feedback sensitivity: the degree to which your behavior maps to signal. That’s what makes an organism adaptive. That’s what makes a person adaptive. Not just quick to change, but able to change in a way that fits what’s real.

It’s not a side trait or a quirk. It’s the foundational condition beneath every other trait we call adaptive. Learning? Downstream. Flexibility? Downstream. Even thought (real thought) starts with the ability to pick up on what’s true, and respond.

That’s what makes it so fucking painful to live in a system where most signals don’t mean anything.

Modern civilization is full of transitions, but they aren’t tied to any real need. They aren’t about my body, or the land, or the seasons. They’re constructed. I move from one grade to another. One job to another. One building, platform, device, account to another. One activity of questionable importance to another. It’s not that my life changes…it’s this weird environment demanding I act as if it has.

I try to keep up. Because I’m still wired for signal. I still think transitions mean something. But they don’t anymore. They’re non-referential. They point to nothing. They’re fast, constant, and nearly always disconnected from any ecological pattern or how ready I am. And the more I try to track them, the more exhausted I get. Because I’m not supposed to track that kind of noise. I was never meant to.

Modern civilization doesn’t create real transitions. It just repartitions reality…chops it into convenient segments that suit its own internal logic. It rearranges things for the sake of efficiency, not coherence. It runs on deadlines, not seasons. Bureaucracy, not biology. And when its logic starts to fail (it usually does) it doesn’t get corrected by feedback. It distorts or severs the feedback loops that would normally force it to change. So that I get corrected. I get labeled.

It builds itself on top of the coherent system (the real one: biological reality)…but increasingly in defiance of it.

And then it calls me broken when I struggle.

But let’s be honest: struggling to move from one meaningless task to another, from one harmful environment to another, should be difficult. Struggling to shift from something that matters to something that doesn’t…that should be hard. If it’s not, that’s not a sign of health. That’s a sign that something inside has gone quiet. That feedback sensitivity (the thing that tells you what fits, what hurts, what’s true) has been pushed down so many times it stops trying to speak.

We live in a place that celebrates that. It calls it resilience. Social intelligence. Professionalism. Maturity. But more often than not, it’s just the absence of protest. A learned silence.

Here’s a deeper layer: over time, humans selected themselves for exactly that. Not for sensitivity to truth, but for compliance. For docility. For the ability to tolerate contradiction without protest. That’s self-domestication. It’s what lets people smile while a system collapses around them. What lets them adapt to noise, to simulation, to systems that reward pretending more than perceiving.

And that’s not a knock on anyone…it’s just what systems like this select for. If I can’t seem to get on board with that, I’m pathologized. Called inflexible. Dramatic. Disordered. And those are all accurate descriptions of me in places like that.

But is difficulty with incoherence really dysfunction? Isn’t it the thread of something real?

I can handle change. I can’t ignore when a change isn’t grounded in reality. When a signal doesn’t match a truth. When the transition isn’t tied to anything that matters. My whole system lights up. I think maybe it’s supposed to.